


Blood Bound

by c3mf



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Blood Magic, Bloodletting, Demons, Gen, Magic, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-12-07 17:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/751176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/c3mf/pseuds/c3mf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Knock knock, let me in. Let me be your secret sin."</i><br/> </p><p>The only thing that makes the things in the dark not so scary is knowing <i>you're</i> one of them.</p><p>Written for the Cabin Pressure fic meme <a href="http://cabinpres-fic.dreamwidth.org/4885.html?thread=6905621#cmt6905621">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Bound

It was all but impossible to spot the demon in the crowd, not when they wore human skin so well and smiled such sweet, beguiling smiles. That effortless assimilation was precisely what made their children such a threat. They had all of their father’s unholy wickedness, housed in a flesh that would not burn from blessing or holy water, tempered with all the conscience and compassion which favored mankind.

But there was one single affinity the demons and their progeny shared and that was their propensity for darkness.

The monsters all came at night, stalking outside doors, prowling by windows, searching and clawing for a way in. They whispered sweet-nothings, simpered and cajoled to prove what little threat they posed. Like princes, they promised all of the world laid bare if only for a safe place to while away the hours until dawn. _Let us in,_ they pleaded. _We are lonely and the dark is so very cold._ They made themselves into wretches to be pitied, and when they begged for company, even the most steadfastly iron of wills could not turn them away.

All it took was a simple “come” and in they slipped like a sickness. Then, when they had charmed their way into bed and heart, they unravelled their ever promised to reveal the lie beneath. By then it was too late. Like thieves, they stole the warmth from bones and substance from souls, feeding on human kindness to live again. They preyed upon the weak and the lonely, unmaking them with devil kisses and shared sin.

It was something their victims never forgot.

~*~

_Epping, 1971_

Douglas’s mother refused to teach him how to cast, so of course it was the only thing he wanted and he fixated wholeheartedly on it. He practiced in secret, squirreling himself away within his mother’s study whenever she was away, pouring over texts and his mother’s marginalia, drinking down every last detail and memorizing every working he could find until his eyes burned and his skull felt full to bursting. 

But there was only so much to be gained from research. Eventually, theoretical knowledge has to be put through practical testing to discover any sort of merit. It was for that reason, despite his better judgement, that he hunkered down in his mother’s study, where the curtains were still drawn despite the midday sun, and thought to finally put all he had learnt to use.

Really, what better place to perform an art meant to be whispered in the dark than in the very place where everything in the world forbidden to him was kept?

His mother’s athame trembled in his grip, gilded and silver so it caught light where none should be and prickled against his palm like static. He didn’t have one of his own and no amount of begging and pleading had made his mother yield. But casting was comprised of hushed and stolen secrets. Nicking a ceremonial knife was simply in keeping with tradition.

He pressed the tip of the blade against the pad of his thumb and took a deep breath. 

Just a moment of pain and a pinprick of blood and he could finally silence the thrumming hum underneath his skin.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He jerked around at the sound of his mother’s voice. All at once hot pain flashed across his hand and the athame tumbled from his fingers, which were quickly going numb. 

With a scowl, his mother strode across the room to pick up her athame and lay it gently as could be on the desktop. 

“For Christ’s sake, Douglas,” she snapped, in complete counterpoint to the the softness of her fingers on the blade. “How many locks is it going to take before you realize there are some places you’re not meant to be?”

He said nothing and instead bit the inside of his cheek to distract himself from the burn throbbing across the meat of his thumb. He cradled his hand to his chest, cupping it so the blood pooled in his palm rather than dripping onto the carpet. The less mess he left, the shorter the lecture he would be forced to endure. 

When he didn’t answer, his mother rounded the desk, throwing open the bottommost drawer with more force than was strictly necessary. She spread the first aid kit out on the blotter and perched herself on the edge of the desk chair. 

Douglas went to her without any prompting and dutifully held out his hand. He didn’t need to read any working to know she was furious. The sharp line of her mouth and the flare from her sigil rings made the full extent of her displeasure abundantly clear. 

She wiped away the blood with quick, economical swipes of gauze and he did his level best not to flinch when she applied the alcohol. Pulling away would only ensure that she held tighter and that the pain would last longer, neither of which he particularly wanted. The bandaging went quickly enough, a scenario that had been perfected after years of his bull-headed mischief and his mother’s practiced tolerance towards playing nursemaid. 

It wasn’t until his hand was wrapped and the kit stowed away that his mother curled her fingers around her athame and locked her gaze with his, stormy eyes and dark hair making her into something too cold and dangerous to ever be considered something as soft and delicate as his mother. 

“This isn’t a toy,” she told him coolly, her words even and inexorably firm. “And what I do isn’t a game.”

Some small part of him knew it wasn’t a beratement but indignation jerked his chin up even so. “I know it’s not,” he said. “But how am I supposed to learn if you refuse to teach me?”

She only raised one elegant brow at him before wiping away his blood from the blade with more care than she had shown to him. When she was done, she flicked open the lid of the small chest sat on the corner of her desk--wood as black as carved shadows with thick silver workings in exact mirror to the knife. Reverently, she laid her athame back on the bed of silk so dark its color couldn’t even be guessed. 

“Had it ever occured to you,” she said, wiping away the last of his blood from her fingertips, “that perhaps I don’t want you taught?”

Indignation bubbled into a slow burn of resentment and barely-restrained rage. “Had it ever occured to _you_ ,” he managed through gritted teeth, “that if you don’t I’ll just have to figure it out on my own?” 

His mother closed the lid with a definitive click that echoed through the room and fixed her eyes on him without a word, her face smoothed into a skillful mask of apathy that drained every tell from her features and deadened her eyes. Her stillness was what unsettled him though, as it did every time--how it was her fury instead of his own that clenched his heart and paralyzed him where he stood, and yet he could never once find a trace of it in her.

Her rage was in his bones, her disappointment in his blood, beating alongside the fear pounding in his heart. But he was determined and if getting what he wanted--what he _needed_ \--meant taking a stand, then that was exactly what he would do. 

Resolve pulled his shoulders back and he licked his lips. “I won’t stop,” he told her, his voice more quiet and tremulous than he would have liked, but no less resolute than he felt. 

There was a moment where the only sound in the room was the drumming of his own heart in his ears, so loud and frantic that he was certain his mother could hear it too--hear it and know that she only needed to wait him out, let the doubt eat away at him and leave him struggling under the weight of his own failed expectations.

When she was the first to look away, he felt the world rock on its axis and send him reeling.

She sighed then, shaking her head. He felt an echo of her despondency, a stab of finely-pointed exasperation, but more than anything he felt her resignation, sinking and complete. It was nearly enough to make him miss the tiny but unmistakable thread of fear buried underneath all the rest. That gave him pause. If she was frightened, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to know the reason, but he had already gone this far. This was precisely what he had wanted all along, for her to finally bend and let him in... wasn’t it?

She took a breath as if to brace herself and simply said, “The first rule of casting: Never cut your fingers.”

He was so stunned the only thing he could manage was a quickly blurted, “Why?”

The smirk twisting the corner of her lips was enough to let him know it wasn’t an entirely stupid question. “Because only novices and imbeciles prick their fingers. Never cut somewhere where you can’t hide the damage. It’s how they find you.”

For a moment he stood, staring at her, letting the words sink in. Then he settled himself in the chair opposite her and did what came naturally. He gave into his curiosity. “And who are they?” he asked.

“The ones in the dark who know exactly what they’re looking for.” 

His mother spread her hands flat against the blotter and the movement immediately drew his eyes to them. It wasn’t the first time he had ever noticed the scars criss-crossing her fingers, but it was the first time he had ever seen them as something more than unfortunate accidents. 

They were tragedies etched indelibly into her flesh.

This time the fear thrumming through him was all his own. The only thing he could sense from his mother was a stony, unshakable surety. “What are they looking for?” he breathed.

“Simple,” she said, and in that moment he could feel his entire world come undone. “A way in.”

~*~

_Fitton, 2013_

The first time Douglas saw Martin cast he nearly had a heart attack.

The spell itself was almost childish in its simplicity, nothing particularly taxing or terribly complicated about it at all. In fact, it was exactly the sort of hand-me-down given to a promising student to test their aptitude for workings. It certainly wasn’t anything he wouldn’t have trusted Arthur to handle.

No, the thing that made Douglas’s heart stutter in panic was the careless way Martin flicked open his pocket knife. It was a garishly cheap and utilitarian thing, the casing matte-black and plastic, without a single protective etching. It was meant for crude DIY jobs, not ceremony.

When Martin pressed the blade purposefully against the pad of his thumb, it was more than Douglas could take.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he growled, snatching the knife away from Martin before the boy could do something terminally stupid. “Who taught you how to cast? Only novices and imbeciles prick their fingers.”

Martin only gaped up at him, caught somewhere between confusion and indignation. The only thing Douglas saw were the dozens of tiny scars decorating Martin’s fingers. Without a second thought, he awkwardly rolled back his sleeve and nicked the soft skin at the crease of his elbow with the very tip of the blade. The blood welled up readily, but not enough to make a mess. He was too practiced for that. He caught a few drops on the knife’s edge, just enough for a proper cast, and gingerly offered the knife back to Martin, as to not waste a drop.

Naturally, he expected Martin to be somewhat reluctant—bloodletting of any kind was a dubious practice at best and not readily shared under someone else’s watchful eye. It was frowned upon in the same way as sex work and curse-making, shunned for propriety’s sake and kept well from public view. He had always considered Martin to be a tad prudish, but he was rather taken aback by the thorough look of disgust that twisted up Martin’s face.

“Aren’t you going to take your knife?” he asked, keeping his voice perfectly even.

Martin actually shuddered and cringed away as if Douglas had presented him with a human sacrifice. He supposed, if he were to be a abundantly literal and archaic, he was doing just that. But semantics and symbology had never meant terribly much to him, not when they were solely used to muddy the waters.

“I... I can’t take that,” Martin stuttered. He couldn’t even seem to bring himself to look at the knife, let alone take it. “It’s _your_ blood.”

“How very observant of you,” Douglas replied dryly. “What I think you failed to pick up on is that I cut myself for _your_ casting, and it would be moronic and, more importantly, scornful of you not to use it.”

It certainly wasn’t considered a norm, sharing blood for castings, but it wasn’t entirely unheard of. Frowned upon by the upper echelons of society, surely, but what didn’t they frown upon and then practice themselves in secret, behind closed doors? Hypocrisy was the gift of the privileged, after all.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Douglas pressed. “It’s already done.”

“You shouldn’t have done it in the first place!” Martin snapped, flushing in agitation. “You _do_ know what I could do with this, don’t you?”

Snorting wasn’t the most elegant of responses, but it couldn’t be helped. The fact the Martin, of all people, thought he actually posed a threat to someone like Douglas was downright laughable. 

“As if you could thrall me,” he scoffed.

“Then why?” Martin snapped. “What could you possibly gain from this?”

Douglas blinked. “What makes you think I’m gaining anything at all?”

“Because you’re _you_ ,” Martin insisted. “The man with no less than seven ulterior motives at a time, isn’t that it? Why shouldn’t I think you have something up your sleeve? I’m untalented, not stupid.”

“Then it’s rather a good thing that I have such confidence in your abilities--or lack thereof.” To drive that point home, Douglas offered the knife up again, more forcefully than before.

“I... I _can’t_ ,” Martin practically choked. “It isn’t right.”

This was about ethics then, was it? If Martin was so worried about something as inconsequential and flimsy as morals, he never should have tried his hand at dabbling in the first place. Casting, in theory, was simple, but not for the faint of heart--if Martin had stumbled into it on a whim, well… The boy wasn’t as bright as Douglas reluctantly gave him credit for.

Nothing for it then. Douglas had dealt with his scruples with casting long ago. If Martin had any intention of continuing, then he had better as well. The sooner, in fact, the better.

Douglas didn’t bother trying to hide his exasperation. “Were you planning on binding me?”

Appalled, Martin simply froze. “No! Of course not!”

“I’m fine then.” With that, Douglas all but shoved the knife into Martin’s hands before the boy could even think to move, and stepped back.

For a long while Martin sat in his chair, back like an iron poker, staring blankly at the bloodied knife in his hands. Under the darkness of his freckles, his face had gone startlingly pale and for a moment Douglas thought Martin might be spectacularly sick. 

Eventually, though, the color rose in his Martin’s cheeks again, even as it was obvious that he had to force himself to swallowed down his reluctance. He roused himself after a while and completed his casting, drawing the circle and calling the quarters as quickly as he could whilst still keeping the spell’s integrity intact. But as soon as he finished, he dug his handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and feverishly wiped down the knife, thoroughly and completely. When he was satisfied that every inch was clean of blood, he thrust the handkerchief into Douglas’s hand.

Without a word, Douglas pocketed it and sat himself at the desk. In response, Martin pointedly buried himself in his paperwork and refused to meet his eyes for the rest of the morning. 

Douglas tried to muster even the slightest bit of irritation at the obvious slight, but the only thing he felt was the quiet but pervasive satisfaction of knowing that no matter what idiocy Martin got up to now, at least he was protected.

~*~

_Epping, 1971_

The lack of furtive secrecy and the end to the imperative need to keep his experiments and his research in the dark was the only benefit that came from his mother’s tutelage. In the light of day, the art of casting lost some of its luster. What he had once found thrilling had slowly turned into something far more ravenous and bleak than he had ever thought possible.

His mother had been right. None of this was a game.

He was a child to have ever thought it was. 

Which was why his athame--an exact copy of his mother’s in every facet--still sat in its carved box beneath his bed, untouched. He hadn’t brought himself to touch it since the day his mother had presented it to him, and he wasn’t certain if he ever would. So much responsibility balanced on the edge of a knife, so much potential in a single drop of blood... The possibilities twisted his stomach, because now he knew there were so many ways for it to go all wrong.

But the need to cast still sung in his veins, insistent and all but impossible to ignore. So he turned his talents to crafting instead. There he could find at least some alleviation in bespelling enchantments to satisfy the itch. He _had_ to.

He pulled the ropes of hand-strung amulets from their glass-doored displays and set to taking them apart. One by one, he ran his fingers along the bleached bones and the etched metals, pushing his will into the beads, willing the enchantments to give way beneath his touch. What he needed now wasn’t protection, but relief. The beads cracked under his hands easily, the blowback of the ruptured spells snapping against his palm, until every last one of them was broken and drained, forlornly scattered in pieces across the desktop. 

Then he restrung the lot and began again.

The blowback was harder this time, sharper and more widespread, bursting against his palm until he started to lose feeling in his fingers. 

“Must you insist on doing everything the hard way?” 

He glanced up to his see his mother leant within the study’s doorway, arms folded and one brow imperiously arched. The smile on her lips was one of fond exasperation.

Douglas scowled and went back to his beads. “Then teach me the easy way.”

“Sacrifice is _never_ easy.” When he answered her with a not-at-all-petulant silence, she hummed and crossed the room to prod at a stray bead with one well-manicured fingernail. “These are all useless,” she told him. “Get rid of them.”

He stopped to glare up at her. “Why? They’re still able to hold a charge. Look.” He plucked the bead from her and held it up for her inspection. A ripple of blowback buzzed against his fingers, running down his arm until he could feel it echo in his blood.

She took it from him, daintily holding it between finger and thumb. “So it does,” she ceded after a moment’s careful consideration.

Before he could revel in any sort of smug satisfaction, his mother turned and hurled the bead across the room. The moment it hit the wall, it burst with the sound of a thunderclap, the ensuing shockwave stealing all of the air from the room. The blowback shattered the glass displays and toppled shelves in a flurry of broken bindings and torn book pages.

For two heartbeats, the silence and the stillness were absolute--like the aftermath of a bombing.

Then his mother slid her gaze to him, serenity personified. “Imagine the damage that charge would have done against your skin,” she said. “Once they break, they can’t be relied on. Not unless what you’re looking for is pain over protection.”

With the blowback still buzzing under his skin, setting his veins alight, there was no room left in him for resentment. It was all he could to to remember how to breathe. He had no idea how his mother could stand it.

“Second rule of casting,” she told him. “Never reuse your wards.”

~*~

_Fitton, 2013_

As powerful as Douglas’s blood was, not even his crafting lasted forever, no matter how intact it was kept. They unravelled bit by bit, fraying at the seams, until one day the spells faded like gossamer and drifted empty on the wind. No crafting was meant to be kept so long. Charms broke. Talismans rotted. Every one of them, ephemeral and so easily broken. Replaceable.

The crafting on recast talismans and charms was never as strong as the first cast, and almost always more volatile. Casting could be unstable enough as it was for some--pairing that with capricious, makeshift crafting was a disaster in the making.

A shame no one had ever let Martin in on that.

Which was the only reason Douglas could think of why he became completely incensed when he came in on Monday morning to find Martin tirelessly fiddling with an ancient length of beaded amulet.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Martin blinked up at him, then went right back to restringing his beads--so old and fragile and overused that the carved workings had nearly rubbed away. Martin wasn’t crafting an amulet, he was making himself a hand-me-down suicide necklace.

Douglas crossed the room and snatched it from Martin’s hands before he would think better of it. Beads scattered across the desktop and clattered to the floor in a shower of sun-bleached bone on lino. Martin made a strangled noise in the back of his throat, half indignation, half dismay.

“What did you do that for?” Martin snapped, dropping to his knees to gather up the beads, one by one.

As if in answer, the length of amulet still in Douglas’s hand rattled and sparked enough so he had to jerk away. Martin froze, horrified. The beads cupped in his palm tumbled noisily to the floor again. “Oh god, are you all right?”

“Fine,” Douglas said, carefully curling the amulet into his hand. He closed his fingers around the coiled length and squeezed until he felt the last dregs of power dribble away like sand. After a minute, he settled the remains of the amulet back on the desk, content that what was left was no more than an ornamental, dried-out husk.

Martin was still staring at him, wavering between confusion and concern. Douglas smiled and flexed his fingers, automatically drawing Martin’s gaze. “Nothing a skin graft couldn’t fix,” Douglas said, and laughed when Martin paled. “Oh, honestly. I’m fine. It was only a spark. A spark,” he added, “that could have turned into something far more serious whilst it dangled from about your neck. What were you thinking?”

Martin’s face set itself into a grimace of bulldog stubbornness, but even so, he kept his gaze pinned to the floor and scuffed his shoes... like a recalcitrant child. Ah. So he _had_ known. The blame lay with his pride then and that was the root of most failed castings everywhere, wasn’t it?

“It’s never done that before,” Martin offered lamely. Even he didn’t sound convinced that his explanation was up to snuff.

Douglas, however, knew to take concession where he could get it. “It was only a matter of time before it did,” he said gently. “You know that.”

“Of course I know that!” Martin gusted out a weary sigh and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I only needed one more week out of it. Two, at most. I’ve got jobs lined up with my van, my chequebook is balanced, my pantry has more than pasta in it so I just thought...” He grimaced and drew a hand over his face, fingers massaging at the pinched lines between his brows. “I should have known better, really. Why should my luck ever hold?” Dejectedly, he collapsed back into his chair and glared at the amulet as if he hoped to set it aflame.

Fleetingly, Douglas wondered if setting fire to it would appease him.

He settled into the chair opposite Martin, careful to mind the beads still on the floor--he hadn’t drained those yet and stepping on one could very well give him more than just a nasty shock. Martin didn’t look up, just hunched his shoulders and folded deeper into himself.

“What was it for?” Douglas asked, nodding at the amulet.

Martin stretched out a finger and poked at a loose bead, sending it rolling across the desk. Douglas caught it before it could fall and discreetly drained it.

“A bit of everything,” Martin said eventually, his voice small and flat. Defeated. “It’s the only piece of crafting I own--well, _was_ the only piece of crafting I owned. I don’t suppose it’s any good to me now.”

“Not as something useable,” Douglas agreed. “It looks very old. Heirloom?”

Martin’s lips quirked a bit at the corners, gaze wistfully settling back on the amulet. “Belonged to my dad. Crafted it himself. He’s the one who taught me how--Simon and Caitlin never really cared, but... I was good at it, Dad said. I might be shit at casting, but crafting... Crafting I can make last. Could make last, anyway. By the time I fix up another amulet half as good as this one, I’ll be old and grey and I won’t need it anymore.”

“Maybe you just need the right material,” Douglas said slowly, carefully choosing his words, in an effort to ignore the sudden and incessant buzzing along his veins. 

Martin simply snorted. “You’re probably right, but some of us aren’t blessed with such means, unlike certain naturally-gifted first officers who will go unnamed.”

Instead of rising to the obvious bait, Douglas instead stooped and went about picking up the beads one by one. Draining them took concentration, and concentration kept him well away from the unsettling fact that Martin couldn’t be further from the truth.

~*~

_Epping, 1971_

Douglas found the grimoire in his mother’s glory box.

It was shoved in the bottom of the hall cupboard, buried under odds and ends that he would have thought were destined for the bin. Inside, there were bottles of oils so old they had separated and packets of herbs and incense that crumbled at his touch. Rings of all shapes and size looped together on a leather throngs, so dented and tarnished that the very idea of wearing them was absurd. Sentimental value, surely. 

As soon as he curled his fingers around the lot, his hand went numb--not the pins and needles of sleep, but the absence left by amputation. The longer he held on, the quicker the paralysis spread, until the throng slipped from his deadened fingers and clattered to the floor. Once the feeling had returned to his fingers--which took a disconcertingly long time--he shoved the lot away with the toe of his shoe and kept well away from them. 

He took to his inspection much more carefully after that, testing various vials and loose stones with the very tip of his fingers, bracing himself for the sudden emptiness. Instead all he found were half-spent tallow candles and a chalice wrapped in a stole of bloodred silk stitched with workings that made his vision swim.

What kept him digging wasn’t the fact that the materials were odd or even all that surprising--he recognized ritual items when he saw them--it was that his mother kept them locked away and left to waste. These things were meant to be used and cared for, spread out upon an altar and worshipped. 

That was when he saw the white silk lining the bottom of the box. It was embroidered with lace and tiny pearls, soft to the touch and so very out of place among the rest. Carefully, he lifted it out, surprised at the weight of it and hard, angled press of something beneath. It wasn’t until he had unfolded it across his lap that he realized it was his mother’s wedding dress, and there, hidden under layers of silk and lace was a simple leather-bound book. 

The embossing across the cover was worn almost completely smooth, the gilded lettering all but rubbed away. Inside, the pages were cracked and yellowed with age, and whilst the scrawled and downright elaborate writing made reading somewhat of a chore, in the end, none of it meant anything to him. Outside of his evening prayers, his Latin was spotty at best, but even so, something in the pages called to him, whispered to him so sweetly and urged him on. 

He recognized his mother’s handwriting cramped into the margins of elaborately drawn diagrams, circles and symbols he couldn’t even begin to put a name to. At first, her notes were hastily and awkwardly scrawled, but the further he read the more they steadily deteriorated into furious and incomprehensible scribbling. 

With every painstakingly-detailed circle he ran his fingers over, it was as if something in him woke up and sang. It felt like coming home.

The blood was what stopped him reading. It was splattered over one of the circles, meticulously traced over the inked lines. In an instant, without knowing how, he knew it was his mother’s. All at once, he was overwhelmed by the scent of her--spice and ink, spent candles and cigarette smoke. When he laid his hand over the working, it was her pulse thrumming his his veins, her heart beating in his chest. 

It was her resentment and disgust echoing through him that brought him to tears. 

_Never loved me,_ his mother’s voice whispered, languishing in the current of a thousand other voices. _Never loved him. Mistake, all of it. So lonely, so cold. He promised. So wicked, so cruel. Beautiful. Lies. Lies and pain. So much, so very much. Pain. Painpainpain._

_Let us in!_

Fire bloomed across his palm and snapped him back to himself, gasping like a drowned man. His mother was crouched in front of him, unnaturally still and stone-faced, her athame clenched in one hand and dripping red. 

“I need you to let go,” she told him. 

Slowly, the shadows bled from his sight and brought him back to the hall with its polished floors and whitewashed walls, let him sink back into rooms bursting with sunlight. 

The taste of ash lingered on his tongue.

“Douglas,” she pressed. “Let go.”

The only thing he could think to do was lift his hands. The moment he did, he saw his blood splattered across the pages, drenching the circles and the text. The red was in complete counterpoint to blackened stains his mother had drawn years ago. Before he could be sick, his mother pulled the grimoire from his lap and snapped it shut. 

Suddenly, it was easier to breathe.

Without another word, his mother rewrapped the grimoire in her wedding dress and laid it back within the box, and piece by piece the rest followed, meticulously arranged and tended to with more care than its cupboard-imposed exile merited. Once everything was stowed and the box relocked, his mother turned to him and took his hand in hers with a grimace.

“What--” he swallowed unsteadily, “--was that?”

“Exactly what they’ve always wanted,” she told him. She swiped at the blood in his palm with her thumb to reveal the skin beneath, pink-scarred and freshly healed. “For you to open the door.”

“I--I didn’t _mean_ \--”

“They don’t care about intention,” she snapped. “They only care about the fallout afterwards.”

The shadows blurred at the corners of his vision, and clenched his heart, churning ice in his veins and stoppering up his breath. 

“I felt you.” The words were choked, all but spilling from him. “Inside of me. You were angry and screaming and you hurt so much.” Tears threatened again and he blinked them furiously away, ignoring the painful way his chest hitched with the beginnings of a sob. 

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t expect for her to hold his hand or sooth him. His mother had never been the type to give into coddling, but if she had given him nothing else she had burned the truth into his bones since he was old enough to speak. It was something to cling to, at the very least.

When she brushed her fingers against his cheek, he froze, anticipating the echo of her under his skin, but instead feeling only the warmth of her hand. 

“Third rule of casting,” she whispered, her eyes dark and stricken. “Never enter into any pact.”

~*~

_Fitton, 2013_

The air sizzled the second Douglas stepped over the threshold into the portacabin, the blowback of dozens of half-completed circles warping and sparking against his skin. 

Workings were crumpled and scattered across the floor, all of them smudged and failed. Every last one of them broke his skin out in gooseflesh and set his teeth on edge. 

Instinct straightened his back and curled his hands into fists. 

It was the stillness found in the deepest storms just before the first lightning strike. A prickle of static and the scent of burnt ozone. 

Martin, of course, only grimaced and tossed another crumpled sheet of paper in the vicinity of the bin. 

“Fortifying the portacabin, are you?” Douglas asked with so much forced nonchalance it was nearly painful. 

“The only one to blame here is yourself,” Martin intoned without glancing up, sweeping a line across the page, smudging it with the side of his thumb. “I have nothing left to craft, so I might as well try my hand at casting again. Practice makes perfect, and all that.”

 _When it’s not making the office into a minefield and electrifying the air,_ Douglas thought.

If Martin was at all amused by the way Douglas picked his way across the room, he didn’t mention it. The bin was overflowing with discarded castings, but the desk was blessedly free of any except the one Martin had spread out before him. 

“Been at it a while, I take it?” Settling himself in his chair, Douglas could just make out the outside edge of the circle Martin was meticulously filling in, swooping curves and harsh, straight lines. He recognized it immediately for a the beginnings of a binding. “A lot of hard work for things you’re not using.”

Martin spared him a brief glance and shrugged. “Yes, well,” he said, rotating the page with inkstained fingers, “call me backwards or old-fashioned or what have you, but believe it or not, my first response when presented with some sort of difficulty is _not_ to bargain it away. I’m not _that_ desperate.”

“Of course not,” Douglas needled. “As Sir always elects to take the high road on such matters. The likes of Sir would never dream of stooping to the sort of impropriety upheld by the world at large. Your lion-hearted restraint puts all of us lesser mortals to shame.”

“Oh, har har,” Martin said with a roll of his eyes. “Tease me all you like, but there isn’t a pact on earth I’d be willing to make to get my casting up to par.”

Douglas tilted his head back, eyeing the nearly-finished circled and tried to ignore the tell-tale itch between his shoulder blades--the anemic sting of mangled cast. “You do well enough with your crafting that you shouldn’t need to cast, don’t you?”

“If by _well enough_ you mean _scrape by with the skin of my teeth_ then yes, I do well enough.”

A child’s petulant exasperation, as ensnaring and as deadly as any pride. Douglas wasn’t immune to its pitfalls--his daughter had taught him that, and that despite his very best intentions, her well-being would always come before his own. It was what she needed and it was what he would give her, without question. She was innocent and defenseless, but most of all, she was _his_. He found that was all that really mattered.

So against every casting rule he had ever learnt and against all notions of self-preservation, Douglas fished out the chain hung around his neck, leant across the desk to grab Martin’s hand, and deposited the length of it in Martin’s palm.

For a moment, all Martin did was blink up at him, startled into stillness. Then he took a good look at what Douglas had given him, at the tiny vial etched with workings, and bolted up out of his chair, sending the chain arcing into the air.

Douglas snatched it before it had the chance to hit the floor and closed his fist around it tight. He should have known what an utterly catastrophic idea this would be...

Martin had worked himself into a bit of state, color high on his cheeks, eyes wide and a tad wild. “That’s...” He stopped, took a steadying breath and tried again. “Your blood. Why... why would you give that to me?”

“Because I thought it would help,” Douglas said evenly, even as he felt the first fingers of indignation bloom in his chest.

“How... How would having _your_ blood around my neck help _me?_ ”

“Because it might stop you making the idiotic mistake of broadcasting to the entire world just how poor a caster you really are!” he snapped. “Because you insist on _cutting your fingers._ ”

“You told me not to. I _know_ not to now!” Martin’s voice rose incredulously. “That still doesn’t explain why I need _your_ blood for _my_ castings. You... You don’t just do that, give your blood to someone. Now who’s the one making the novice mistakes?”

Douglas said nothing, hoping the silence would soak up the resentment and irritation and smother his mistake. 

“God,” Martin breathed after a moment, choking out a laugh. “This is just you wanting to show off again, isn’t it? Baiting me into doing what you want. Douglas, this _isn’t_ a game. The things I could make you do with this... ” His voice went soft, level and, of all things, terribly gentle. “If you didn’t know me... If we were strangers... I could do terrible things to you with that, you do know that, don’t you?”

Douglas merely scoffed. “It’s not anything I wouldn’t provide for my daughter.”

“But Miranda’s firstborn,” Martin said. “She doesn’t need your protection anyway.”

“She’s not.”

Martin blinked. “What?”

“She’s not firstborn,” Douglas repeated, enunciating each word crisply and clearly. “Mine or Laura’s.” The bite of the words almost overpowered the ache in his chest at saying them aloud.

Then the only sound in the room was Martin’s breathy acknowledgement of stumbling into a completely unwanted and decidedly uncomfortable topic. Even so, Douglas couldn’t find a stopper to his voice, the bitterness and the uncomfortable crackle of wards spurring him on.

“The thing about cambions,” he continued, “is that they’re just like any other halfbreed species. They can’t breed.”

Silence.

His skin was too tight, his bones too brittle, all of Martin’s wasted influence hemming him in and squeezing his chest in a vice. The roar of a thousand whispered voices thundered through his veins, stoking the bitterness into a rage that refused to remain unspoken. 

“It’s the reason they’re so good at what they do,” he ground out, "making others trust them. Cambions, I mean--proper name. They _need_ to be. They can’t extend their own lines so they insinuate themselves into other people’s because it’s only way for them to ever have a family of their own. Because if they didn’t charm and convince, they’d spend their entire lives alone. Most think sharing their blood is a small price to pay, if it lets them escape that.”

“Douglas...”

It was the kindness in Martin’s voice that silenced the din and washed a soothing emptiness over him. He sank back into his seat and ran a weary hand over his face. God, he was too old for this. All of the hiding and the fighting and the denial. He was _tired_ , wrung out and wasted. The hum of Martin’s concern prickled at his skin, swept over him, and for once he didn’t shut it out. 

“Did you honestly think the things lurking in the dark were just stories?” Douglas sighed at last. “Ignorance doesn’t keep you blissful, despite popular belief. I know all about the things in the dark, Martin, because _I’m_ one of them.” He took another breath and slowly laid the necklace on the desk between them. “It would... put me at ease if you just kept that with you. And for God’s sake, don’t lose it.”

For a long while Martin simply stood, cutting his gaze between the vial and Douglas, expression drawn inscrutably blank. Then, without a word, he leant across the desk and scooped the vial into his hand.

“I may be a rubbish caster,” he told Douglas, “but I’m not stupid.” He draped the chain around his neck, straightening it fastidiously so the vial lay directly over his sternum, so very close to his heart. The symbolism was not lost on Douglas. “Thank you,” he said. Then he paused. “Wait... Does this make you my familiar now?”

Douglas snorted out a laugh, despite his best efforts not to. “I do believe that is the most preposterous notion I’ve ever heard--and keep in mind I’ve known Arthur for almost ten years. Then again,” he drawled thoughtfully, “it’s so preposterous, it would probably work.”

Martin slid him a sidelong look, his lips quirking up in a smile that was just a shade off from coy. “So you’ll address me as Master and do my bidding?”

“I’ll address you as _Sir_ and we’ll continue on as we are.”

Shaking his head, Martin pulled at his collar and tucked the chain beneath his shirt. “How could I resist such a bargain? No wonder you’ve never had any problem keeping your pacts.” Another pause, hesitant and unequivocally abashed. “Is this a pact?”

Douglas took up Martin’s pen and sketched out the finishing pieces of the ward until it blazed to life. “It’s whatever you need it to be. Sir.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _"Knock knock, let me in. Let me be your secret sin."_  
>  \- "Labryinth" by Oomph!
> 
> Very inspirational to the fic. I recommend listening to it while reading.


End file.
